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This Friday 23rd at 13:00 we will hack our way into the HIV drug resistance problem.

HIV drug resistance is a problem that every person on therapy will eventually face. It can sometimes develop on its own after years of treatment or, more commonly, when a person fails to take the drugs as prescribed.

Following the massive increase of people on treatment (from less than 800 000 in 2000 to more than 18 millions in 2016), a non-negligible rise in the prevalence of resistant HIV strains has emerged and threatens the global commitment to end the HIV epidemic by 2030.

If no action is taken now, and this problem left unaddressed, HIV Drug Resistance could lead to a new crisis in the HIV epidemic.

Through this data4good hackathon we will get an understanding of epidemiological and non-epi factors influencing the emergence of HIV-DR and a model mapping the spots. This will result in dynamic and up-to-date graphical and visual representations of HIV-DR maps allowing governments, health workers and other stakeholders to be informed on the topic and to turn the understanding of the drivers into actionable items in the prevention and countering of HIV-DR. As part of our mission we intend to educate on the approach and outcomes locally.

About the HIVHACK :

We are happy to invite you to our yearly data4good hackathon that will be held at DigitYser.

Here are the 8 Real Challenges Data Scientists Face by

1. You’ll Need To Be A Specialist, Not A Generalist
2. Understand The Business Reasons Informing Your Choices
3. It’s Best To Have Cross-Department Expertise
4. Explain Technical Concepts To Non-Technical Audiences
5. You’ll Spend A Lot Of Time With Raw Data
6. Collaboration Is Key (You Won’t Work In A Vacuum)
7. Be Flexible And Consider Context
8. Regular Maintenance And Version Control Is Essential

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Each year, the diSummit brings members of Data Science communities together to explore the potential value of recent breakthroughs & best practices to business.

The Summit is a community event, where everything is provided for you to connect with the best, and network with your peers.

Our philosophy is “No bullshit or false hopes”

“We scraped away the marketing noise, ignored the projects done outside of Europe and ended up with a conference that is all about practical business outcome, #AI Breakthroughs, best practices, and business transformation.”

It is up to you to make the best of your day. You can meet inspiration listening to the Ignite talks, boost your technical skills in the hands-on workshops, dissect successful AI projects in our master classes, find interesting new job opportunities at the Job Fair and meet experts that can implement the most advanced solutions in the Partner Village.

In the coming 3 years, we are going to put Belgium on the fast track of #AI with the “AI-Hub” program. Our aim is to deliver more value to the sector and participate in European initiatives to drive a Responsible #AI. Let’s make the world a better place using #datascience!

You are an essential part of Belgium’s AI Hub. there is no time to waste and there are no more excuses because we now have :

Data science communities in most major Belgian universities

amazing partners supporting us

training programs to boost competence in #AI

A large #AI clubhouse in the center of Brussels for workshops, bootcamps, trainings and meetups

A second big data4good project to work deliver called “HIVHACK.org”

Enjoy this inspirational day, thank you for being here, use #AI in a more responsible way, and see you tonight at the BBQ with the best beers of Brussels!

Lots Networking is organised to allow everyone to connect with the right people of the industry.

Companies recruiting are present at the Jobfair to meet the experts and the young graduates that wil be present.

At the Partner Village companies looking for solutions can talk to the real experts

Inspiring day geared around learning and sharing

Over 50 presentations in the plenary

Master Classes for the managers in the break outs

Hands-on sessions for the nerds in the break outs

There is a very exclusive speakers’ dinner hosted by Prof. Hugues Bersini on June 20th.

And at the end the day there is a BBQ with the best craft beers of Brussels

It is the 4th edition and all previous editions were sold out.Please don’t forget to forward this to your teams and recruiting experts because you can still book a booth at the JobFair or in the Partner Village.

Presenting Fritz Schiltz our youngest speaker of #disummit – he will talk about using #machinelearning to improve the ranking system of schools.

Fritz is an applied econometrician at the University of Leuven where he applies advanced analytics to evaluate policies, mainly in education. He has worked on reports for the European Union, the Ministry of Education and Syntra. Halfway his PhD in Economics he shifted his interests towards machine learning methods. His presentation is the result from joint work with the Bank of Italy and illustrates how machine learning or AI methods can be used to improve school rankings using an Italian dataset.

Machine learning methods can be used to improve the assessment of school quality. School rankings based on value-added (VA) estimates are subject to prediction errors, since VA is defined as the difference between predicted and actual scores of students. More accurate predictions result in more informative school rankings, and better policies. We introduce a more flexible random forest (RF), rooted in the machine learning literature, to minimize prediction errors and to improve school rankings. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the advantages of this approach. Applying the proposed method to administrative data on Italian middle schools indicates that school rankings are sensitive to prediction errors, even when extensive controls are added.

At the 2017 Data Innovation Summit I highlighted the need to take ethics into account when designing algorithms (see also the first meetup we organized at DigitYser with the help of Philippe on this topic). This was my priority at RTBF and has been one of my main area of work at European level as chairman of the Big Data Initiative of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). This priority seems nowadays to be shared by many and I’m pleased to see that the situation has improved a lot in the last months. I’ll start my 2018 keynote at the Data Innovation Summit with some concrete examples before moving on the next big challenge (and the topic of my 2018 talk): Data Sovereignty.

I first coined this term during a keynote speech I gave earlier this year to RTBF employees in an attempt to raise their awareness on why we need to become less dependent of internet traffic referral sites like Google and Facebook. I further explained my vision in this article.Data sovereignty is especially crucial for media websites which rely too much on on Google and Facebook. Some fellow members of the European Broadcasting Union have seen their traffic badly hit after Facebook and Google changed their algorithms, revealing our overall dependency to these third-party ecosystems. At the 2018 Data Innovation Summit I’ll give some astonishing examples of this dependency and will explain the RTBF strategy and what we have done in the last 12 months to achieve our goal: becoming more data-independent and building a sustainable and bright long-term future for our organization. Besides explaining the steps we undertook to realize this, I will also share with you the message I gave to the members of the EBU Big Data Initiative and the “state of the union” as far as data independency is concerned.

I hope to see you in Brussels on 27 June and to share ideas with you on those important topics.

Pierre-Nicolas Schwab is the founder of market research agency IntoTheMinds He has been Big Data manager at RTBF (Belgium) since 2016 and was elected chairman of the Big Data Initiative of the European Broadcasting Union (Switzerland) in 2017.

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Well, well, well, I bet some of you didn’t expect a DSL meetup in May anymore. Ha! That’s where some of you were wrong! We are sorry that it took so long but we can finally announce a meetup on the 29th of May. We have one confirmed speaker already. More to follow!